Have you ever wondered who invented the pencil? Or what led to the creation of the swimming pool? Object Lessons is a beautifully designed book series—published by Bloomsbury Academic—that explores the hidden lives of ordinary things.
PW spoke to the series' editors, author and scholar Chris Schaberg, Bloomsbury US's Director of Scholarly and Student Publishing Haaris Naqvi, and author and game designer Ian Bogost, about how the series was born, how it's changed their perspectives on the world around them, and what's ahead for Object Lessons in 2024.
Before we dive in, can you explain the series in a sentence or two?
Chris Schaberg: The series is based on two simple constraints: Write about a single object in around 30,000 words. We liked the idea of short, pocket-size books that could be read in a sitting or two, and which would forever change the way you think about an ordinary thing.
How did it come about?
Haaris Naqvi: I worked with Chris on his first book: a strange, brilliant, super-charged title about airports in the cultural imagination (The Textual Life of Airports). I was quickly keen to do more books like this and also to work with Chris again, so we started to discuss ideas for a series. Ian was on a wishlist of people we wanted to work with, and it turned out he was developing something similar at the Atlantic, so pretty soon we joined forces; and our ideas were merged into Object Lessons.
How do you choose which objects to cover?
CS: We read all pitches that come through our website portal, and sometimes we reach out to authors to suggest that they propose a book. Other times, Haaris shepherds a book idea our way from his various conversations with authors. As we review book proposals, we think about how the new topics would constellate or congeal with the existing titles…seeing the whole series as an evolving shape, as it were.
Has the series impacted how you look at the world around you, and the everyday objects in it?
Ian Bogost: I see the series as an ongoing exercise in a way to look at the world around me. I had wanted to take better and more serious note of things of all kinds, but that’s hard to do constantly. The series allows me to immerse in others’ approaches to objects I might never have pondered or taken seriously, let alone researched and written about. It’s a terrific gift.
What have been some of your favorite Object Lessons titles to work on?
CS: Working with Summer Brennan on High Heel, we had an early moment while editing the manuscript when we realized the form wasn’t quite working and needed to change dramatically. Summer leapt to the challenge, and the final book turned out brilliant.
HN: Cigarette Lighter by Jack Pendarvis may be the funniest book in the series. By contrast, Ayanna Thompson’s Blackface and Alison Kinney’s Hood may be among the most sobering.
Which new titles in the series are you most excited about?
IB: Air Conditioning, by Hsuan L. Hsu, just landed on my desk. This is one of those topics that people may think, wait, a whole book on air conditioners? Is this some kind of Andy Rooney joke? But air conditioning has completely altered human life on Earth, for good and for ill, and that makes it a fascinating and important topic.
CS: Maggie Messitt’s Newspaper—because I never could have imagined this book, how it moves across the history of early newspapers to tell an incredibly timely tale.
HN: That’s not really a fair question, given all the terrific books we have coming up, but I’d like to give a shoutout to Mask by Sharrona Pearl.
What can you tell us about the Object Lessons Institutes and the partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities?
CS: We ran general audience writing workshops [called Object Lessons Institutes] with NEH funding in 2017 and 2018. In many ways, those crystallized the lessons we’d learned from co-editing Object Lessons up to that point. Throughout the workshops, we were able to point to real examples of pitches, proposals, and published books that all came through Object Lessons. In other words, the series gave us a kind of lab-space in which to see a public-writing project happening in real time. I think the participants benefited from being able to peek behind the curtain of an actual book series. It wasn’t abstract. The NEH workshops also taught us about the need for this kind of mentoring at an institutional level, leading toward our current project, the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis.
IB: Just to elaborate on what Chris said... Not all of our authors are academics, but some of them are, and we learned a heck of a lot about what goes right and wrong when scholars try to reach audiences beyond their speciality. We wanted to share that knowledge, and the NEH grants provided the first step to doing so. Now, a decade after we started, Chris is working full-time on public scholarship with me at Washington University. Really a dream come true, although there’s much work left to do.
You’re nearing a major milestone: 100 titles published! What will be your centenary entry in the series?
CS: Good question! We ran an open call for the 100th volume and received around 75 pitches for what that title should be. The range of ideas was as impressive as all the topics we’ve already published, from guns and viruses to pianos, clotheslines, sewing machines, and passports. We will announce the topic of the 100th volume and its author early in 2024.
